Civilization VI Releases October: Here’s Every Detail

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As if 2016 didn’t already contain a richenoughseam of strategygames, Firaxis announce today that Civilization VI will be released on October 21st. Development duties are in the hands of the team behind Civ V’s expansions, Gods & Kings and Brave New World, and when we spoke to designer Ed Beach and associate producer Sarah Darney last week to learn all the details, they told us that almost every system from the complete Civ V will be included in the sequel: trade routes, religious systems, archaeology…there’ll be no need to wait for expansions, it’s all in the base game.

The game is running on a brand new suite of software, built to be far more mod-friendly than its predecessor, and as well as brand new AI systems, there are a host of new mechanics that will explore and emphasise your relationship with Civ’s greatest character: the map.

The most immediately notable change in Civ V as compared to IV lay in the handling of military units. No longer could armies be stacked one on top of another, taking up space in the same tile. As well as preventing the creation of ‘doom stacks’, single-tile armies of formidable strength that encouraged mass production of military units for both defense and attack, Civ V’s approach allowed for tactical combat utilising features of the map. Strong defensive units could be placed around weaker units with ranged weapons, and deploying around rivers and mountains was more involved than previously.

Civilization VI does to the city what Civilization V did to the military.

Beach refers to the new mechanic as “unstacking the cities”. “The unstacking of armies revolutionised the way the military side of the game played out and we’re making a similar change on the economic side of the game. Everything is now placed on the map, blowing the cities apart. All of the upgrades that you build are now spread across the landscape in the area of control of each city.”

This isn’t simply a cosmetic change, although it should make for urban landscapes much more visually varied than Civ V’s cities, so often surrounded by hexes thick with repetitive farms, trading posts and other improvements. The main purpose of the change is to encourage a stronger connection to the geography of your nation.

Civilization, by its very nature, has always been a series that explores the player’s relationship to the history of their nation. History is the element through which you move and the very fabric of the game – the Civilopedias down through the years have been the gateway to wider historical reading for me, and the city-centric view of society is an integral element of the games, both mechanically and academically.

With Civ VI, Beach and his team want to elevate the importance of geography. Location has always been important, of course – that first choice of where to settle and whether to burn a few decades searching for the perfect river delta is one of the key moments in any Civ playthrough, from I to V. Civ VI will mark the first time that the geography of your nation influences every aspect of the game, however, from city specialisations to military tactics and research.

It’s the latter connection – between the tech tree and terrain – that could change the flow of the game most dramatically. When I suggest that the new features seem designed to encourage flexible playstyles, ensuring that players don’t conform to routines, Beach agrees.

“You’ve hit on one of the main themes. We want to break people out of their consistent playstyles. When we look at the way people play, we see certain strategies that are used again and again – they’re the best practice for the early game or the mid-game. We’re calling the new approach to technology “active research” and it takes a sledgehammer to the old method, to stop people from doing the same thing every time they play.

“Your situation on the map is going to influence how you approach the tech tree for the first time. In previous Civ games, you picked what you wanted to research and then people worked at it. It wasn’t particularly interesting and it wasn’t integrated with what you’re doing in the world, so we looked for a way to tie research into what your civilization is doing out in the world and on the map.

“In Civ VI, almost every node on the tech tree has a boost attached to it – kind of like a miniature quest that you can fulfill to speed up the tech. For example, the masonry boost requires stone blocks and quarries. You can research that tech by hand without access to stone, but if you can find a quarry site and get one up and going, you unlock the tech boost and that gives you half of the research points needed for masonry.”

Your geographical situation should always influence the short- and long-term goals that mark your journey through history.

“Think about naval research – [in previous Civ games] you could research sailing and navigation, even if you’re landlocked in the middle of a continent. Now you can still try to do that but it’s going to take you forever. It’s usually more sensible to hold off on that until you actually have found the ocean, so you can settle a city on the coast to unlock the first boost toward sailing. Then maybe you need to build fishing boats to boost the next naval tech.

“You can’t just burn through the tech tree the same way in every game because the map is going to force you to think through things.”

And the same should be true of construction and improvements. With cities now spreading across the tiles they control, it’ll be more important than ever to specialise, using the land to your advantage. As with research, the districts that make up a city – and there are twelve types of district in total – can take advantage of geographical features. Beach explains:

“Where do scientists study? One good place is near diverse types of life, so a scientific campus will gain bonuses if it’s near a rainforest tile. And maybe they’re trying to figure out how the stars and heavens work, in which case an astronomical observatory might be a good idea. That’s going to get a bonus if it’s placed near a mountain.”

Sticking with the example of a city specialising in science, all of the buildings, whether labs, libraries or universities, will require a specific type of district to support them. Rather than having a city surrounded by mines and railroads, funneling cash into the city centre to fund research, Civ VI will see research campuses and other districts placed around the city, using the lay of the land to their advantage where possible.

The interface will help you to decide on a spot for new cities, as in the past, recognising which tiles will work best for different district types, taking into account everything from their terrain type to adjacency bonuses that make district-building like “a little puzzle”. Cities can still control up to 36 hexes but the number of improvements that they’ll need to work the land has been reduced, with districts moving in to fill the gaps.

There’s one other major change that Firaxis are already prepared to discuss: AI.

“A lot of Civ VI was built by looking at where Civ V worked really well and where it wasn’t as strong as we had hoped. The variety offered by leaders in the world was a place where we could see room to improve. We were really pleased with the different experiences that people had playing as the different civs, right down to the the exceptional nature of the Polynesian or Venetian civs, but when you played against the AI, the differences weren’t as apparent.

Every AI leader in the game now has a set of agendas – personality quirks that inform how they approach the game. As well as providing a twist on how they play, these make each leader something of a known quantity because one of their agendas will always be a ‘historical’ pick, based on their personality. That allows you to anticipate how they might behave – no news yet as to how Ghandi’s agenda might affect his Civ reputation – but there will also be a random agenda applied to leaders, which you’ll only be able to discover by observing them, or through trading and diplomatic contacts.

That brings me to the final areas in which change is brewing. Diplomacy will be overhauled but Firaxis aren’t ready to talk about the specifics of that just yet; they’re only just announcing the game, after all. From the few details I did manage to gather, it seems that the key to the new diplomacy may well be in the way that interactions change through the eras of a campaign. It begins very informally, with the sending of gifts, basic trading and declarations of war, but eventually becomes formalised and more complex as embassies and their ambassadors spread across the world. There will be, Beach says, more than one way to declare war.

War itself is changing as well. Beach is satisfied with the one unit per tile approach but wanted to “eliminate some of the congestion” that it caused. To that end, units can now be organised into a formation, which means they’ll always move together rather than having to be shuffled across the map one at a time. Formations can be applied to large collections of military units or civilian units and their escorts.

There are also new support class units, many of which were formally designated as military units in Civ V. These are units that are more sensibly depicted as special equipment embedded with a larger unit rather than standalone figures on the map. I’d expect the likes of anti-air and anti-tank units to fall into that category, along with other specialists. It’ll also be possible, under certain circumstances, to stack two or three units of the same type to create a powerful combined force. These are exceptions to the non-stacking rule rather than symptomatic of a shift away from it.

A new appreciation of the map, through those research boosts and city districts, sounds like a splendid way to shake up the Civ formula. The retention of features from Civ V’s expansions is almost as exciting as any of the new features though. I’m increasingly coming to expect new games – particularly sequels – to act as a foundation for future growth rather than as a continuation of what came before. If Civilization VI can buck that trend by building intelligently on its immediate predecessor with some bright ideas of its own, October can’t come soon enough.

Civilization VI will be out October 21st and we’ll be taking a close look at it in the near future.

No doubt through big free patches. It’s the same method Paradox has used successfully with CK2 and EU4. Lots of tweaks if it’ll solve the issue, big overhauls if a system really doesn’t work and the DLC will really bring something new to the table. It seems to be much more profitable too, so it’s win-win for both sides.

They didn’t say they won’t release DLC’s, they just said the DLC stuff from V will be on the base game. I expect they’ll release big game-changing expansions in due time, and I expect I’ll be buying a complete edition with all those expansions about a year after due time.

Until then, that big mod that’s changing everything about Civ V (ew, that sounds like a Buzzfeed article) is coming out just a few months before VI. Fitting.

Endless Legend dealt with cities in a really novel way… but it doesn’t look like Civ VI is going that route, unfortunately. I’m worried tile improvements will just be replaced by districts and now have adjacency bonuses but otherwise function identically. The scale of Civ is pretty wacky since you can just plop down cities so close to each other, which works great when each city is constrained to a single tile but I don’t see how it’ll be possible to distinguish between districts of one city and another in Civ VI.

Yeah I mean if you look at the real world development of big cities, initially they would be surrounded by smaller towns, which gradually get swallowed up into one big urban mass, those towns then become districts. We aren’t seeing London, Birmingham and Manchester in any danger of becoming one big urban mass though, and the way Civ has worked so far, where it’s not generally a good idea to space your cities too many squares apart in the early game, it’s quite easy to see how you’d end up building city improvements outwards until both cities meet and you’d end up with Judge Dredd style “megacities” all over the place.

From a purely aesthetic point of view I love the idea though. I always wanted the cities I’d built from being wood huts to turn into something a bit more impressive than the not much bigger graphic representations you ended up with at the end of the game.

Real-world militaries, of course, being well-known for going into battle with soldiers stacked six or seven high.

(Much like when people say that the reason Heroes III was better than IV was because of the graphics, this is plainly bananas. There are things Civ IV did better than V. Stacks of doom are not one of them.)

I am definitely of the opinion that the system in V was an improvement on the one in IV, but I also think a combination of the two would be even better. Allowing units of the same type on a single hex or having a cap would eliminate some of the tedious navigation required and allow for larger armies, whilst not removing the tactical element and avoid the dull doom stack.

Endless Legend did something like this, and it worked very nicely in my opinion. You could split the armies into the separate units of course, but without the morale boost of being an army with a hero leader they’d be very vulnerable.

I think a good solution might be to allow limited stacking of compatible units, but give a congestion and logistics debuff to stacked units, because having 10 regiments of soldiers in the same area IRL would have them tripping over each other and exhaust the resources of that area pretty quickly. Give them severe penalties to movement while stacked, take a full turn to enter or leave the stack, cost more food or whatever upkeep while stacked to simulate the complicated job of getting food and materials to a camp filled up with a billion men, and maybe give a slight penalty to overall strength (so 10 units with 100 str each only adds up to like 900 because they are not used to fighting together and in such a big formation)

Yep agreed, so you can create situations where spearmen defend swordsmen, machine gunners can defend infantry soldiers etc etc. Maybe have cavalry/tanks operate alone because it makes no sense to have troops getting trampled underfoot/run over.
It makes no sense that my defensive and offensive units have to stand side by side so that the enemy can just ignore the defensive unit and take out the offensive one. You would put your offensive unit right behind the defensive one, protected, until it was time to attack.

Yes actually, what if stacks were limited to 3 military and one civilian per tile?

Combat could then incorporate some minor era-specific bonuses that different combinations allow the player – for example when crossing from medieval to renaissance, knights with ranged and melee mixed in would retain their effectiveness, but once gunpowder is researched, pikes with the same stack-mates would begin to eclipse them (to represent the discovery and spread of Tercio infantry tactics).

This would help push players into diversity and historically-thematic army mixes, while the multiple stacks would mean mobility and interpenetration isn’t affected as much. Additionally, an army could be stretched out or constricted as the circumstances require…

Alpha Centauri already solved the stacking problem by making a unit’s destruction do collateral damage. Especially when using nerve gas a 20 unit stack (as the AI was wont to send) could be destroyed by one unit in one turn. This (artillery damaging every unit on a square) made unit placement far more important and made it impossible to just walk over.

Are you seriously trying to say that having an entire army made up of separate units of cavalry, archers and infantry geographically spread out across thousands of miles, each attacking and defending individually in their own battles, is somehow a better simulation?

Paradox solved the stack of doom problem years ago, the right way: Attrition, supply limits and war exhaustion.

Civ’s direct rival Call to Power solved the problem a long time ago with armies of a maximum size with specific slots for the core, flanks, support units etc which meant you actually wanted an army with combined arms. Although games like Panzer General with their one unit per tile and rock-paper-scissors approach are entertaining they are largely so because the game maps are predesigned with the enemy formations set up. The AI in Civ games just isn’t smart enough to organise their units capably and the macro scale of the map just doesn’t fit the micro scale of the armies. A Roman army of 3 legions, some cavalry and some ballistae shouldn’t stretch from Rome to Berlin.

I fear the same is going to be true of Civ VI cities. We’re going to get ludicrously over scaled urban sprawl of twee little districts.

I viewed it as changing the stack from being a vertical thing, 50 in a tile, to a horizontal stacking in depth, injured units would fall back and reserve units would jump up in their place.

That said, I would like to see a system where you could use general, or commander type units to allow for *some* stacking, and an experience/upgrade system to customize your commanders. A pocket full of experienced commanders wielding buffed slightly larger stacks could be the difference between blowing a front open and getting bogged down in a war of attrition.

But you look at the movement of modern armies, advance routes and roads are assigned for use. We rarely see mobile campaigns though in this modern age.

Patton at Avranches is one of the more interesting incidents in modern military history to me, he broke a cardinal rule, never intermix units on the road. He simply posted signs on the roads out of town for the various units to take, and then posted a general, 2 star I think at the bridge, and a few more senior officers on the roads in, to keep traffic moving. Completely intermixed units of his army and they straightened themselves out.
The thought of a general and some colonels playing traffic cop with their senior grades just makes me chuckle.

Back to the point though, I really truly hope they can deliver an AI that is finally a good challenge, as it stands, it usually ends up being a walkover in one direction or the other depending on the difficulty.

One thing I really enjoyed with 5 was the mobility and projection of ancient armies you could manage, a city on the plains without walls was very vulnerable early game, but it could be a real bitch to try and dig one out surrounded by hills. In earlier games it would be nearly impossible to get enough units to bear to outweigh the stacks that the cities would have produced by the time you got there.

Yeah I had the same thought about unit stacking. I think there is a middle ground to be found there. The “stack of doom” changed to the “doughnut of death” where completely surrounding the enemy was the most powerful attack.
Limited stacks of units would be nice, for instance pair a squad of swordsmen with a squad of spearmen, and be able to choose the spearmen to be the defensive unit, i.e. they will absorb the enemies attacks first, then be able to send your swordsman on the offensive. It would be more realistic to how those sorts of battles played out, you would protect your dangerous offensive units closely, not stand them on their own where enemy cavalry could snap them up, completely ignoring the spearmen stood in the next “square”.

The only thing Civ 5s system allows in this respect is ranged at the back, melee at the front, but the rock paper scissors nature of Civs units could work really nicely if you were allowed to at least pair units up and tell which one to stand at the front (i.e. take the first attack), which one to stand at the back.

I still consider that Civ4’s issues with stack of doom was mainly that the AI wasn’t smart enough to use artillery’s collateral damage to deal with them.

And that this supposed “stack of doom” “issue” was solved in 1999 in Alpha Centauri, where losing a unit means collateral damage to all the others in the stack, unless in a city (and artillery is ranged).

Then it also helps that Alpha Centauri has still the most complex tactical combat of any “Civ-like” titles, with features like Zones of Control, subversion of lone enemy units by probe teams, and unit design :link to weplayciv.com

That’s the new age of censoship for you. Companies are so scared about complaints about anything that might have to do something about sex, that they end up even blurring old pieces of art because of it.

And franky, that is ridiculous. World will always have simple minded people who get afraid of the terrifying power of breasts, but I don’t think the societies, or companies, should start jumping scared of them too as well.

Well, this is certainly a refreshing change from the way Beyond Earth was presented, with the leads enthusiastically backslapping themselves for innovatively reinventing broken versions of Alpha Centauri mechanics. Sounds like a solid look at what’s actually wrong with Civ 5 and an intriguing bunch of possible solutions.

The districts idea sounds like it’s come from Endless Legend, which bodes well. There are worse ideas than cribbing ideas from Endless Legend.

I do worry (as usual) about diplomacy: Beyond Earth managed to significantly regress in that area after it overhauled it even if diplomatic-capital-as-a-resource wasn’t an inherently bad idea. But the lack of name-checking in that regard also bodes well.

To be fair to BE’s diplomacy system, the civ style diplomacy completely failed to work within BE for a variety of reasons, to the point that in the base game you could be playing with no other civs and see essentially no difference.

I don’t expect them to use the BE diplomacy system for other civ games, but for that game in particular I found it works pretty well.

What little is said of diplomacy doesn’t seem that interesting. Lots of options late game are good, but I do long for a 4x game that will actually let me communicate with the opponents in more interesting ways than sending them gifts and trade agreements. I want to have some actual dialogue with them!

With a bigger focus on terrain and how it influences your civ. I’m hoping this will finally be the civ game that takes into account things like draining resources, climate change and overpopulation.

I get that this stuff doesn’t fit the optimistic tone of civ games and would be a better fit for something like Endless Legend or Fate of the World with their apocalyptic undertones. But I just think they’d be interesting mechanics to have to deal with in a game like this.

Also, there’s other forms of society that don’t rely on infinite growth, I’d love to see a game that includes those. Endless legend already did a fairly good job at that I guess.

Civ games paint this picture of endlessly growing and consuming civilizations being the best thing ever, while you happily go about destroying ‘barbarians’.

I would like to see pollution and climate change come back too. It seemed oddly lacking from Civ V considering how relevant they are today. Of course you should be able to engineer around it and save the planet, I really prefer the series’ positive attitude to the “everything darker and edgier” trend in gaming. But it shouldn’t go overlooked like that.

Hey, good thoughts here. That would be neat (but frustrating) if you could use a resource tile of bison or some other animal/crop to boost your city growth but if you kept the booster on for too long, or maybe if the city grew too fast or too big, the resource tile would disappear, forever. Or even maybe a tech/building would eventually be researched that would let you construct animal conservatories to restock the world map with otherwise depleted or possibly even extinct animal resources.

How will it run? Civ V runs pretty lousy to this day, especially because of how it forces you to wait for the AI to move all of its units. Just let us turn off AI unit movement! I’m worried turn length will not be reduced by having more and more city elements being rendered on the map.

I’m also not crazy about the art style. It’s very generic. Firaxis’ artists aren’t especially great–a lot of artwork in Civ V seems to be copied from Google Images, and many of the Wonder illustrations seemed to be photos with a filter on them–but this seems like a straight-up step backward from Civ V.

Will Sean Bean be the new narrator? That’d be a real surprise, both because he seems expensive and because the Civ IV expansions suggested that it might be tough to wrangle bigger names back into the studio to do a few new lines. Although maybe that was just Nimoy being a pain; he was all over the place in Fringe, too, and the show suffered from having to work around him. Or maybe Firaxis just had a bad contract for IV; I assume they made V’s narrator agree to return for expansion content when they signed him up.

I personally don’t believe a grain of the statement that “we included everything with the game so you won’t need any dlc”. I may change this thought when it is released and actually is feature complete but I have my doubts.

They’re shipping a deluxe edition with the first 4 DLC so it won’t be non-existent. Thy just seem to be promising that the features added to Civ 5 through DLC will be in the main game. You’ll still be offered 100 new leader heads, unique units, scenario maps etc via DLC.

The city improvements filling the local terrain, and actually specializing a city instead of just spamming all city improvements… sounds more strategic and like a great evolution forward.

My biggest fear in this is that in literally every Civ game so far, a Civ that builds industrial powerhouse cities will almost inevitably win against Civs that try to max out economy or science or social policies. Because of this, all of my cities in most of my Civ games are jack-of-all-trades with one or two cities specializing in science or culture because of world wonders and national wonders, not because of better positioning.

Secondly: This is my first time on RPS. I understand that this is site is ran in the UK (I’m from US) and I have to say… that its refreshing to read some actual reasonable discussions in the the comment sections that don’t include bigotry, sexism, pointless insults, etc. I don’t know what this says about non-Americans compared to Americans, but its nice and I’m going to be checking this website out more.

It’s only your second time here, wait for it… but yeah, generally the commenters here are well behaved. That said, as anywhere we do get an extra helping of blissfully callous and insensitive commenting from time to time.

I too am in the U.S. and one of my favorite aspects of RPS is that they really do seem to go out of their way to write about the whole spectrum of PC gaming rather than just their favorite bits and pieces. I’ve read more about games I’ve never heard of and grown interested in games I would otherwise never have discovered let alone played because of the dedication of the team here.

Geography-linked city improvements sound interesting. I hate the new graphics style though (if that’s what it is). Looks like something optimized for mobile games.

I know we’re not supposed to complain too much about graphics with strategy games, but the world map is something we’ll be staring at for a very long time. I don’t think I could play Civ VI the way it looks in those screen shots. It’s a very odd design decision.

I think it’s entirely reasonable to be concerned about the graphics in a strategy game when the asking price is £49.99; most AAA titles on PC are £39.99 for crying out loud.

To ask for that price for a game that is likely going to lack the depth and staying power of, say, Civ IV Complete Edition, or Civ V Complete Edition, is really taking the mick. Civilization V was barebones at launch, and let’s not even get into Beyond Earth.

I don’t understand why game designers now think it’s their job to stop me playing the way I want to play. If I like adopting a certain predictable strategy in each era, why does this guy care? Why does he think it’s his job to prevent me doing that? Games are supposed to be fun and relaxing, not an endless ordeal of shifting rules designed to punish you for being predictable. And anyway, decent AI would be a better way to address that alleged problem than forcing the player to seek out power ups in order to research particular technology.

Unstacked cities sound dubious, too. If your city is besieged, will you lose the benefit of your improvements? In real life, many ‘improvements’ and ‘wonders’ are frequently located in one central, easily defended area.

I think the game looks good. Very clean and detailed. The problem is that those screenshots are pretty boring… I’m sure people will warm up to the art style once we see it in motion and with more context. And no one is going to play with that angle and level of zoom anyway…

“… they told us that almost every system from the complete Civ V will be included in the sequel: trade routes, religious systems, archaeology…there’ll be no need to wait for expansions, it’s all in the base game.”

The trouble is that everyone in the world somehow managed to discover architecture and most places had access to stone, while a Civ random map limits these resources to very specific tiles. The ones that didn’t have access to stone managed to do incredibly impressive things with mud bricks, bamboo or other materials. I doubt Civ is going to bother including half a dozen analogue techs that achieve similar things, so if your first couple of cities aren’t near key resources you’ll be lagging behind, so it just seems to be doubling down on the bad start syndrome. Unless they perform a miracle of balancing, starting near wine that will allow you to discover plantations faster is hardly going to compensate for not being near stone or iron.